631–640 of 717 posts
Employment is a transitory thing. Remember this the next time you spend your life energy fixing something you could get away with letting fail.
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You can make your point (even a bad one, like this) without being snide. Do you have a source supporting your comment that SWE comp in 2005 was the same as it is today?
SWE’s straight out of school made 90-100k in the late 90’s. Isn’t that what they make now?
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And yet, CEOs for decades (the 50s-80s) did just fine at a fraction of wealth disparity compared to today [1]. In fact, in just the last three years; the overall disparity has increased 31% despite corporations failing to properly manage the pandemic or their workforces. 1 - https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2022/05/23/ceo-worker...
Corporate profits are up way more than 31% in that time. So the impact to shareholders is larger.
But you bring up an interesting point. The CEO may be incentivized to promote wealth disparity. If they are measured by profitability only, without regard to the larger systemic effects, it incentivizes them to take a myopic view. This could mean implementing policies that help hit short term targets without regard to long term health, suppressing wages, etc.
To a certain extent, whichever side we’re on is really just a narrative we tell ourselves since there doesn’t seem to be conclusive data about CEO impact.
That's a lot of staff - it means 1/5th of your coworkers got laid off... I'm very bearish on Robinhood - I don't know if they have enough of a moat to defend themselves from other free stock trading apps. People have forgiven so many outages. The Gamestop saga was the straw that broke the camel's back for many.
I like Robinhood and I have no problem with them having technical issues when users a flash mobbed a meme stock. In the end they learned what to do next time.
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Nokia and RIM got clocked by the iPhone. I don’t care who their CEO could have been, these companies were on the downward trend and headed for tough times.
> these companies were on the downward trend and headed for tough times. Exactly why you need a good CEO at the top to understand that the landscape has changed with a new competitor but Nokia and RIM failed to adapt.
Why not cut pay across the board? I know this is not the cultural norm, but I am curious how long this norm can persist. Without the ability to cut pay, layoffs are the only option for companies burning cash and losing altitude. That locks pay increases at the same inflated point that the bubble supported but which reality does not. To go one step further, is there a single advanced economy in which pay cuts, rather…
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One estimate puts it at $170 billion extra flowing into retail investing.[1] Also, it may be reasonable to use the savings rate as a rough proxy. That rate was higher than it has been for decades when the stimulus was active and has since dropped. [2] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/21/business/stimulus-check-s... [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT
How much of that was due to inflation? People could just be trying to get rid of cash. I had a bunch of excess cash due to falling behind on D.C.A.-ing, and I accelerated that (which was not a good idea in the short term, but that's what D.C.A.-ing is all about - wish I hadn't fallen behind on it over the years!) and bought a bunch of under-par bonds and utilities for the yield, sold a lot of now-expired SPY puts and…
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They could hire entire call centers in poorer countries for the cost of a few engineers. That's a prioritization issue on their end
A call center requires actual people skills. An engineer would be the last person you want for that job.
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No heuristic is perfect, but it's fairly easy to quantify empirically from activity/records. Developers who are productive (actually write and ship large amounts of quality code) tend to be valuable and those that don't, aren't. That being said there are some intangibles, like morale etc. It's possible there are people that benefit the team while having low personal productivity. But anyway, no need to approach in th…
> No heuristic is perfect, but it's fairly easy to quantify empirically from activity/records. Developers who are productive (actually write and ship large amounts of quality code) tend to be valuable and those that don't, aren't. If you are factory line worker, yes. If you are a developer or a manager (a "knowledge worker") -- what you could be observed to be doing has usually little correlation with result for the…
Being a developer/engineer is not a particularly unique or hard to acquire skill, it's highly prized only because it's a new domain and there's an imbalance of supply and demand of workers. In the longer run, wages will certainly regress far closer to the median.
What defines productivity will of course be context dependent, but the majority of companies are building products, and it's quite obvious which developers are contributing vs which aren't.
If you're building a novel system that requires a strong theoretical basis for decision making, then you can argue that low output people are potentially valuable. But 99.9% in industry aren't doing this.
And seems many are lacking situational awareness. I could easily rank all the developers in my org with a very high level of accuracy. If you can't you're a poor manager (or branch/subdivision for larger companies).
Seems the vast quantities of butts in seats, do little paid a lot, kind of workers are particularly triggered here. And boy, there are a lot of them.
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> these companies were on the downward trend and headed for tough times. Exactly why you need a good CEO at the top to understand that the landscape has changed with a new competitor but Nokia and RIM failed to adapt.
What about CEOs like Jack Welch, who everyone lauded as a paragon of management? He was handsomely paid but his decisions crippled the company years later because of bad foresight? I think the main issue ITT is that it’s very hard to measure and distinguish a good CEO from a bad one, yet they are almost all paid as if they are great leaders.
The board of directors are the ones who measure CEO performance and set compensation but most of the times they just rubber stamp whatever the CEO does.